1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to the field of mobile geolocation and mobile based applications. It pertains specifically to a system and method for determining audience characteristics of a music concert based on the analysis of mobile phone tracking and mobile data transmissions. In the preferred embodiment, the system tracks, and analyzes mobile data, activity and transmissions, providing audience characteristics of a music concert, including, but not limited to demographics, sentiment, engagement, popularity and segmentation.
2. Description of Related Art
The conventional means of determining the audience size at a music concert, apart from counting people who attend, is to count the number of tickets sold. Information on ticket sales is sometimes available from ticket sales service providers such as TicketMaster. Yet counting tickets can be impractical. Some venues, particularly smaller ones, may not use an accessible ticket sales service like TicketMaster, or may not sell tickets at all. Even if ticket sales were accessible, audience size may not reflect ticket sales if some ticket holders do not attend or some tickets are given away and not accounted for in sales. Moreover, tickets sales alone provide little or no information about the concert, for example, an audience's sentiment about the concert.
Meanwhile, mobile phone use has become nearly ubiquitous. By the end of 2008, for example, there were more than 270 million cell phone subscriptions in the United States, which represents about 87% of the total U.S. population, according to the International Association for the Wireless Telecommunications Industry. With the improvement of mobile phone tracking technology and the increasing incorporation of global positioning system (GPS) technology into mobile phones, the field of mobile data analytics has emerged, which uses location information to understand the behavior of mobile phone users, often in real-time.
A number of research efforts and companies have been formed to exploit this new field. SenseNetworks, for example, is a pioneering company in the field of mobile data analytics. It tracks the location of mobile phone users in real-time, segments them into groups based on common behaviors and locations, and makes predictions about future behavior. One of its applications, called CitySense, tracks the overall activity of a city based on location data and indicates the “hotspots” of activity, such as nightclubs and other venues, wherein activity is defined essentially as the collective presence of active mobile phones at a location. The level of activity of a venue is gauged relative to its historical activity as well as the activity observed at other venues. However. while CitySense application tracks the number of mobile devices at a venue, it makes no determination of the size or sentiment of an audience attending a concert at a venue, the audience's perception of the performance of the concert, the anticipation of the concert, the audience's demographics, the audience's engagement with the artist(s) performing during the concert or other audience participant characteristics, etc.
There are a number of mobile applications that concert goers currently use on their mobile phones when attending concerts. For example, Facebook, for determining which of their friends is also at the concert; Foursquare, for checking into a concert venue to learn tips about the concert venue, or special offers from the concert venue; Flickr, for sharing pictures of the concert; YouTube, for sharing video clips of the concert; and, Twitter, for sharing thoughts about the concert, to name a few mobile applications. However, to date, none of these mobile applications are focused on understanding the audience size and sentiment by amalgamating, tracking and analyzing mobile phone data, activity and transmissions.
Further, all of the aforementioned mobile phone applications have Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), where certain data, if applicable, may be imported from the aforementioned sources, or other third party sources. For reference herein, APIs, are particular specifications that the Concert Profiling System will utilize, to access and make use of services, information, data and/or resources, etc., that are provided by a particular software program that implements the API.
What is lacking in the prior art is a means not only to observe the number of active mobile phones at a venue but also a means to determine the size and sentiment of an audience attending a concert at the venue where the mobile phone activity is observed.